I’ve never paid much attention or concerned myself with 1 star ratings. There are always going to be dissatisfied customers regardless of how hard you try. Since the inception of the new star breakdown I’ve paid closer attention and suspect purchases just to give 1 star ratings.

I have a new(ish) item that had 16 ratings, all 5 star. Two weeks after release it made the top sellers list and then got a 1 star rating. There were no complaints, no support issues, even our forum was quiet. I’m no stranger to the angry customer or the spiteful 1 star rating, sometimes I know it’s coming, but in this case it was completely unexpected. All of a sudden the theme get’s this 1 star after nothing but 5 stars for 2+ weeks, but I shrugged it off and moved on.

After another 2 weeks the theme recovered and got back to a 5 star average (4.75+). Almost immediately we get another 1 star rating. What caught my attention was how quickly after reaching 5 stars it happened. I know this sounds like conspiracy talk, but this is quite the coincidence.

Has anyone noticed a trend like this? Has Envato ever looked at accounts giving lots of 1 star ratings to see if they are suspicious? We’ve all seen authors willing to copy and steal so this doesn’t seem like a stretch that ethically challenged “authors” would apply tactics like this.

We have had similar experiences, new file getting nice early sales, then when the ratings finally appear, there is a 1 star rating, and no email, comment, complaint, nothing. Can’t help but be suspicious.

Not fully sure if it actually matters to prospective buyers, but its just annoying. Its a bit like those files which have 3 sales and 3 ratings soon after being approved. We have a file in the Site templates popular files page from last week, which now has 118 sales and no sign of ratings yet! Suspicious. Ratings abuse is rampant.

Parallelus said
Has anyone noticed a trend like this? Has Envato ever looked at accounts giving lots of 1 star ratings to see if they are suspicious? We’ve all seen authors willing to copy and steal so this doesn’t seem like a stretch that ethically challenged “authors” would apply tactics like this.

I had this for 2 of my new items although the items escaped from disaster due to continuous sales and strong averaging. But I can confirm the alternate 5 star to 4 star (average) swift happening immediately like you pointed.

However, to avoid myself from looking these things with too much of suspicious eye, created another theory to balance: If a buyer isn’t much happy about item, they see the ratings and if it was 5 star, they can’t be patient and they rate it 4 or less to pull down the average. If that item was already 4, then they don’t feel it is necessary to pull down the rating and just move without rating the item. This may appear easily to our eyes when an item is new and has less number of ratings.

@pixelentity, Once one of my item had no ratings for almost 150 continuous sales! Not as a new item but happened when the item was 2-3 months old. As of now the interface isn’t efficient enough to encourage average buyer to rate items – this severely affects the average and so opens door for abuse.

if your item got 1 star, the reason was to be drawn out from the top sell list then, who did it had a file there, and didn’t wanted a file that could hurt his sales.

you can pin point this particular individual from those that had items in the top list the same time your file was there. also, restrict the list by looking at those who have very similar items AND don’t get this one star treatment that was applied to you.

Should be pretty easy to spot him after a while.

Envato should think at better ways of displaying valuable items since with this average search system the popular list is probably one of the main place where buyers look for the items they need.

Staying there is important and can bring you thousands of dollars. Investing some of those money to bring down competition makes sense. Is immoral but is how capitalism works so no surprise there.

I understand what you’re saying. What caught my attention was when the stars for the item looked like this:

5 star (16)

4 star (0)

3 star (0)

2 star (0)

1 star (1)

Like I said, I didn’t think much of it at the time. Just a person that was unhappy and wanted to punish the item (or me) for whatever reason. I understand being frustrated with a product, especially when technology is involved. But when it happened again almost immediately after getting back to 5 stars it really got my attention.

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